UNITED STATES
Some US Public Servants are finding their social circles are shunning them, with friends, families and peers outside Government expressing disgust that they “work for Donald Trump”.
An employee of the Health and Human Services Department said there was “a palpable feeling of disgust for people working for the Administration”.
Others mentioned increased anxiety and depression, as well as heavier drinking.
This is compounding problems at work where employees at Agencies such as Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Environmental Protection Agency say they have seen their core missions changed or even demolished overnight.
Others described living in constant fear that President, Donald Trump’s Budget proposals would end in them being laid off.
One worker said that with policies changing at the drop of a hat, leadership hired and fired on a whim, political appointees undermining existing management, and an increasing sense that their overseers were deeply partisan and ignorant of the issues, his workplace environment was “worse than toxic”.
A senior official at the US Geological Survey, Larry Meinert (pictured) said the last straw for him came when he was asked to supply market-sensitive information on oil reserve forecasts to Secretary of the Interior, Ryan Zinke before that information was made public.
Mr Meinert resigned, saying his Department had previously been ordered to supply the topics of each scientific paper it planned to publish for the next five years.
“When I pushed back and said we don’t know what we will be publishing three years from now because we haven’t done the science yet, I was accused of trying to hide something,” Mr Meinert said.
He said he was relieved to be out of the Agency, as fellow scientists saw his employment there as a “black mark”.
“The idea that you’re working under the Trump Administration is just like you’ve been painted, that you’ve just stuck your foot in a cesspool,” Mr Meinert said.
At the same time, a report from the Office of Personnel Management has revealed that there has been little progress in diversifying the staff of Federal Government offices, with the number of African Americans in senior executive positions actually in decline.
Observers said the data represented a harmful trend of discrimination against African Americans in seeking Federal employment, a pattern they said was unlikely to be corrected by the Trump Administration.
Washington, DC, 3 April 2018
